They apparently have very strong competitors in Firefox for IE, Oracle for SQL Server, LAMP for IIS et al, Google and Yahoo! on the commercial web front, have they spread themselves too thin? If they only choose to go after Google, will they lose significantly in the other areas that they're already having trouble in?
Open source is well equipped to survive because of its long term goals. Successful open source projects are built from the beginning to be extended, to incorporate functonality that was not imagined from the beginning, and to be well integrated and share data with other applications. These are all qualities that you cannot depend on proprietary software for, it is at the whim of the project directors and other developers and users have no direct influence.
If we take a page from the video game industry, american companies would often abandon ideas that were not immediately profitable, often passing over truly good ideas if they could not control them or exploit them as quickly as they needed turnaround. With this sort of hit-or-miss shortsightedness and not striving to build a good idea until it is profitable and to grow around needs/uses of consumers, it is extremely difficult to find a successful formula without lockin.
Nintendo took over the video game market because their vision was that of the long term, in fact they planned out the next 10 years, and rebuilt the video game industry in america when others believed that it was a fad that was dead and gone. They furthered the platform by sharing their experience and helped licensees as in the end it drove demand for more Nintendo hardware and software. But when Nintendo tried to place too many restrictions on third parties, they would eventually find another platform (such as the Genesis, which at its peak had a 51% market share over Nintendo).
Open source software does not have these restrictions, is built with the long term in mind, and users may have direct influence over the applications they work with. Microsoft's place in the market is determined by factors they must control, but to do so they must sometimes overlook the needs of the users, developers, or even their necessity to Microsoft as they must look to their profits to ultimately decide whether to continue development in a certain area. The platform is driven by the interests of Microsoft's profits and success in reality could well be arbitrary. This requires a streamlined and highly successful process and may in the end drive Microsoft closer to open source methods, as they have developed many initiatives recently designed to provide greater interaction and sharing of information with developers, provided more information on APIs, and even produced some of their own software which the user may modify and download without spending money. They have explored their "shared source" avenue.
It will be interesting to see what happens on both fronts.
Er no, the original PlayStation was designed by Sony (as was the SNES sound chip) for Nintendo, who had also contracted Philips to do the same, which was why they ended up with egg on their faces when both went on to make their own consoles. Philips were able to get compensation by having officially licensed Nintendo games on their CD-I, but they were very poor games, the only redeeming quality were the Mario and Zelda licenses they used.
WinFS also adds the ability for any program to use a supported format through the WinFS API, as the API uses meta data to describe the format to the program, as XML does. This allows the application that created the file to be used through WinFS to access the data, sort of like making applications into libraries. It is similar to piping in Linux, as the program produces intelligable information that another program can make use of.
How many times have you downloaded Firefox? I'm over 10, that's for sure.
If you're like me you use your distribution's repository and not mozilla's mirrors. You may also use a CD or network store to install Firefox onto dozens of PCs. Is there any effective way of gaging Firefox's install base?
MS claimed Halo 2 was programmed with the XBox 2 in mind, and that the true Halo 2 experience will be on the XBox 2. So there you have it, assuming you want to buy and play that game all over again and you want to buy the XBox 2 to do it.
All you're doing is breaking third-party applications that rely on them!
The point is third party applications should not rely on them, and these functions could be provided by third party software as well and so they should be interchangable, not rely solely on MS's implementation.
I agree that selling software actually labeled as beta is a bad idea, but don't we already pay for software that require constant patching, such as the latest release versions of Windows, Microsoft Office, and nearly all of the latest games? Does release software even live up to the quality expected?
...they assume that the one system you'd be running wouldn't be Linux. In truth it could apply to any OS but they impose the assumption that you would choose Windows.
A very good article has detailed why the shift from nVidia to ATI happened, it's very enlightening. It's interesting to note that ATI wouldn't be where it is today had Microsoft not adopted their pixel shading implementation for DirectX. Perhaps their feud with nVidia over the X-Box has led to this, along with ATI being chosen for X-Box 2?
Right, and it's my experience that securing Linux is not only a lot easier because there is more information readily available to allow you to determine exactly what you're running and the flexibility in configuring it, but because there are distributions that address these concerns on the desktop with easy to use interfaces such as Redhat's Firewall configuration tool, Services configuration tool, SuSE's YaST 2 configuration tool, so that it's more accessible to the new user.
On OS X and on Windows, applications are categorized in a Extensions Folder and Control Panel, that allows an obvious method of accessing tools that configure the important functions of your system. It is much less daunting than a command line to the new user, as the most important tools and settings are presented in a way that prevents having to collect as much information as is required to accomplish the same tasks on the command line.
In desktop Linux distributions this is happening as well, and often this leads to a greater understanding of the command line. The curious user will notice the relation between the GUI applications and the commands they invoke, and as many tasks still require using the command line, the user will not be totally lost having already been familiar with a more accessible representation of the same tools.
Hopefully more GUI applications will be written to cover a larger scope of command line tools, making them more accessible. A lot of users now have grown up on the GUI, having been the preferred method of interacting with the majority of PC users now since they have become much more affordable and accessible. It's beneficial to provide an interface that caters to that group because it allows more people to get familiar with the OS in a familiar way!
A little background: The 16-bit wars was just luck for the consumer based on companies wanting a better deal than Nintendo was giving them with the NES, when they controlled the market with expensive licenses, bully tactics, and "chip shortages." SEGA marketed the hell out of their machine, with Nintendo trying to grasp at the market share it was losing before its eyes. Before SEGA let up diverted by a struggle brought about by way of internal politics damaging them financially and otherwise with the 32X and Saturn, they had grabbed over 50% of the market from Nintendo.
In the end, both the Genesis and the SNES ended up having a solid library with excellent games because they were both playing hard. It is important that the PlayStation has proven loyal console gamers will go to the platform with the best titles regardless of brand name, hardware specs, or hype. The Saturn and N64 were formidable foes in those respects. The N64 was designed by SGI, code named Project Reality, rendered CG before your eyes and had Mario. The Saturn had Virtua Fighter, was out the door earlier, and blew away the more expensive Jaguar and 3DO.
Today's console market has many more exclusives, and every console manufacturer is trying to lure customers with lasting incentives to remain on the platform, such as Live!, PSX backward compatibility, Gran Turismo, Halo 2, Final Fantasy 11, Nintendo's AAA 1st party titles, exclusive contracts for Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, which console has the most hit titles from japan, these are all things gamers have to consider when buying a console today, and with the next generation it is going to get much worse.
Microsoft are introducing PlaysForSure, the next Xbox will have Media Center tie-ins and stuff will probably be tied into Longhorn. Longhorn will no doubt feature multimedia extensions that cooperate with the XBox 2, and will feature the.NET platform. The Xbox 2 will probably feature the.NET platform as well, games will be easily moved from PC to Xbox 2 and vice versa, making both platforms more attractive.
So Microsoft is predictable (embrace and extend, third time's a charm just press on, rinse wash repeat), and we know Nintendo will have something special (both hardware/software wise, DS tie-ins, they also want to launch the earliest), the wild card here is Sony. What the hell are they going to do? What incentive does Squaresoft have to stay with Sony when MS Moneybags is probably going to do their damnedest to snap them up? Are Sony going to have a "PSX" pulled on them by MS? After Squaresoft announced the advantages of the Sony platform, it had a snowball effect on third parties, and the PSX went on to be an overwhelming success.
Sony tries to sell game systems like high priced hardware that does it all, and they expect everything else to just fall into place. But I have a feeling consumers don't really react as well to that approach when it comes to video games, and this far it has been coincidental. With the PSX they got lucky because they made the friendliest console, they didn't put vast resources into an unknown venture so they took off-the-shelf parts and tried to pull together something decent and easy to program. Luckily Square and others decided the Saturn was botched and the N64 was too limited. They got lucky with the PS2 when they launched a year before everyone else and they could still feed off the momentum from the PlayStation.
But during that first year the PlayStation 2 had a pretty poor library. Imagine if Microsoft and Nintendo had launched just then, it would have been a different story for Sony, because the PS2 needed that year to catch up to the borked launch Sony made. Have they learned from that, or will the PS3 be the same? Now that the PS3 will probably likely launch after Nintendo or MS or at the same time, and the Xbox having a decent software library with enough big names to give gamers a good looking preview of what they might see for the Xbox 2, Sony doesn't have the
Because Gambas is such a high quality release that seems viable, usable, and competitive, everyone is automatically comparing it to commercial alternatives. This is but a testament to the quality of Gambas itself. Great job on the project, we should hope that every open source project would be of such high quality, and releasing an equally high quality IDE developed in Gambas along with it. Simply amazing.
Intel already has more fabs than AMD, this isn't the problem. Dell would be including AMD chips in their systems if it weren't for the fact that AMD doesn't have enough fabs to keep up with demand.
Perhaps the fact that computers were more difficult to use compared to today's computers attributes to that. A while ago you actually had to know something to use a computer, and figure things out to get what you want done. These days people just ask someone else and then forget.
GUIs that give cryptic error messages when something DOES go wrong don't help either, since the error is represented in a much different way than people are used to when interacting with PCs. An error flashes on the screen, you have no idea why as it interrupts your work (unless you're very observant, and already know a great deal about computers), and nothing about the error message tells you what to do, in a GUI format.
There's no button for "Reconfigure option X" or "Reload driver Y" or "Open the conf file for program Z" that even gives you a hint of what's going wrong. And even when you open the conf file, you wouldn't know what to do.
Perhaps in Linux if you're in the habit of running a program from a terminal you have more of an idea of what's going on, but again, you'd have to know something about what you're doing. How obvious is this, even to a recent Windows convert? There are things that become "common sense" that everyone forgets to describe in a help manual. Troubleshooting is especially difficult if you don't know what you're doing and you're afraid of doing further damage to your PC.
These are probably the biggest roadblocks preventing users from becoming adjusted to computers and actually know what they're doing. MS recently started pimping the term "discoverable UI," perhaps this idea could be applied to error reporting and configuring in general. Instead of hiding away advanced options, or restricting configuration to editing a conf file, is there a way to make these concepts easier to understand to the end user?
Instead of "keeping users dumb through obscurity" it might be better to find ways of making things more obvious. People won't touch something if they know it breaks their PC, and they'll be less cautious in checking those options if something IS broken.
What's interesting is that how Sony and Microsoft handle their product launches may have an impact on the amount of games we see for these systems. With Linux gaining ground on the desktop (bear with me here), it is concievable that it might be a larger target for games, if not gaming development on a 64-bit workstation. Epic have already committed to an Unreal Tournament development platform on Linux (Windows 64-bit taking its time is probably also a factor).
The most interesting part, however, is that MS may be putting up.NET as the development environment for the X-Box 2. It makes sense that MS would try to leverage their gaming platform to lure developers onto the.NET platform and commit their engines to that API.
On another note, could Linux and Mono play much of a role in this if the Cell does indeed provide a Linux environment for development? If Sony is able to provide a less expensive development environment, development costs may ultimately go down and the consumer would benefit.
This could be either by the increase of choice since the bar of entry would be lowered for smaller software houses, or by cost if the games are indeed cheaper as a result; Existing engines and software could be ported or would be compatible, or due to the the ease of coding on a familiar platform.
It has been stated before that the PlayStation 3 is expected to be capable of distributed processing due to the capabilities of the Cell architecture. Whether or not that will indeed be the case remains to be seen, it is certainly a lofty goal for the current market penetration (not to mention speeds) of broadband in the home. Does Sony expect these PS3s to cooperate with their Cell-based television sets?
If there's a standard DRM method, it's more likely to be used by all providers, instead of going with a proprietary DRM method and making it more likely to reduce the amount platforms on which the DRMed files can be played. Right now the big breakthrough will come from a format that allows DRM on everything, instead of letting a particular vendor who competes and dominates have complete control over a ubiquitous DRM method.
But many more people could benefit from this idea if it were part of Firefox, or some other cross-platform application. It doesn't have to be Firefox, that just sprung to mind because it also brought tabs to the masses, even if Opera already supported this.
Agreed, but the Firefox codebase is very extensible. It already covers actions on local files, allows you to program applications in XUL markup (such as the Calendar that you can download from Mozilla themselves), this could simply be one of those applications.
If you take a look at this screenshot, you will see that (in the darkened window) the full directory path is represented as TABS that you can navigate and presumably drag groups of files onto to perform actions.
Really awesome. Perhaps this could be added to Firefox, especially for browsing local folders. If it's targetting IE as competition, perhaps it should also include such capabilities. It pioneered tabs as a way to revolutionize browsing, and it would be useful (to me at least) if it included this functionality.
If not, Nautilus and Konqueror could also benefit from this ability. It would help cut down on time. Drag a file onto a tab, you can paste/move/extract to that folder. Click back on a tab, move a directory higher up into the tree, maybe you're organizing your MP3 collection and you need to recategorize a few songs or whatever.
And why not? This has been the open source way for a while now. It's about choice. If users want to browse with IE or Safari or KDE, let them, but provide a plugin compatible with that browser.
Other examples are Cygwin, you can compile and run Linux applications on Windows. Jabber, integrates into many IM clients.
Setting the standards now and getting everyone to accept a cross-platform next generation web interface is much more important than getting everyone to use Firefox and adhere to W3C standards. This should be the goal right now.
OHHHhhhhhhh shit man! That shit is mad funny! I don't care where you from.
And if he ain't considered a GENIUS for sayin' what needs to be said by gum on air and shit then he should be considered that for being a comic genius.
Who would actually in this day and age go up to someone on TV and say something like that? People today can not take a joke. His ass would be sued and never allowed on TV like some people said, fo' sho'.
"Slander" and all that shit. Fuck you, if you can't take a joke and sue them until they're poor. That shit is hella weak, cos you can't come step when the truth is in yo' face. What's wrong with people today?
And even if you don't think it's the truth and you got a different opinion, well fuck you for not letting someone else express theirs and cutting their shit off with a commercial. WTF is the matter with you now? Free speach my ass, truth is you can't even get up and say watchu want on a world-wide CNN type network. What the hell is that shit?
Free speach loud as you can yell it, that's about it. And then you gots people belittling you and shit.
Yo're not allowed to say an opinion unless you can stand up to yourself with tons of people with YEARS of practice in bullshit.
You're not allowed to say an opinion unless you got hella buckzz and lawyers and shit to SPEND money to say that you gotz tha right to say something. WTF is wrong with this shit?
OK so now to say anything you gotta own tha TV, you gotta own tha cash and tha lawyers, and you gotta own tha politicians with they secrit keys ta pull tha plug ta fuck up ya network lest ye protect yourself by lining they pockets and supporting they shit.
Fuck that. So by the time you get free speach, you're already hindered by not being able to say shit about politikz, plus then you gots no reason to complain cos you got that $$$ and lawyerz and you're sedated, either that or worn out by the process of accumulating all this shit.
Hellz ya you gotta be Michael Moore to get up and talk about this shit and bully your way onto the screen and be an asshole. Yeah lotta people think he's an asshole but who fucken cares cos he's the one up on tha screen tellin ya what's what. Get yo own damn show.
One joker did and he got laughed off the stage fast because people realized his shit was bull, he gots nothin' ta say because he just got up to make a spectacle out of Moore. Well Moore's really talking about shit that's affectin' everyone for a long time, not some ass trying ta get his 15 minutes of fame by yellin' at someone who's getting his 15 minutes of fame.
Lotta people may get 15 minutes of fame but it's what you do with that 15 minutes that makes you go into history or not. WTF is wrong with people criticizing other people who gots something to say?
Let these people say something. If it's shit well let everyone else decide that it's shit. How you gonna pull the plug on them before everyone else gets to judge what you pooh poohed? You think you can speak for everyone? What the hell makes your goddam opinion so much more important than anyone else's?
I dont' care what your background is or who you from or what you is, wtf you thinking if you don't think everyone can have their opinion on shit?
Slashdot Mirror
They apparently have very strong competitors in Firefox for IE, Oracle for SQL Server, LAMP for IIS et al, Google and Yahoo! on the commercial web front, have they spread themselves too thin? If they only choose to go after Google, will they lose significantly in the other areas that they're already having trouble in?
If we take a page from the video game industry, american companies would often abandon ideas that were not immediately profitable, often passing over truly good ideas if they could not control them or exploit them as quickly as they needed turnaround. With this sort of hit-or-miss shortsightedness and not striving to build a good idea until it is profitable and to grow around needs/uses of consumers, it is extremely difficult to find a successful formula without lockin.
Nintendo took over the video game market because their vision was that of the long term, in fact they planned out the next 10 years, and rebuilt the video game industry in america when others believed that it was a fad that was dead and gone. They furthered the platform by sharing their experience and helped licensees as in the end it drove demand for more Nintendo hardware and software. But when Nintendo tried to place too many restrictions on third parties, they would eventually find another platform (such as the Genesis, which at its peak had a 51% market share over Nintendo).
Open source software does not have these restrictions, is built with the long term in mind, and users may have direct influence over the applications they work with. Microsoft's place in the market is determined by factors they must control, but to do so they must sometimes overlook the needs of the users, developers, or even their necessity to Microsoft as they must look to their profits to ultimately decide whether to continue development in a certain area. The platform is driven by the interests of Microsoft's profits and success in reality could well be arbitrary. This requires a streamlined and highly successful process and may in the end drive Microsoft closer to open source methods, as they have developed many initiatives recently designed to provide greater interaction and sharing of information with developers, provided more information on APIs, and even produced some of their own software which the user may modify and download without spending money. They have explored their "shared source" avenue.
It will be interesting to see what happens on both fronts.
Why, aren't they usually happy when software patent rights are recognized?
Er no, the original PlayStation was designed by Sony (as was the SNES sound chip) for Nintendo, who had also contracted Philips to do the same, which was why they ended up with egg on their faces when both went on to make their own consoles. Philips were able to get compensation by having officially licensed Nintendo games on their CD-I, but they were very poor games, the only redeeming quality were the Mario and Zelda licenses they used.
WinFS also adds the ability for any program to use a supported format through the WinFS API, as the API uses meta data to describe the format to the program, as XML does. This allows the application that created the file to be used through WinFS to access the data, sort of like making applications into libraries. It is similar to piping in Linux, as the program produces intelligable information that another program can make use of.
If you're like me you use your distribution's repository and not mozilla's mirrors. You may also use a CD or network store to install Firefox onto dozens of PCs. Is there any effective way of gaging Firefox's install base?
MS claimed Halo 2 was programmed with the XBox 2 in mind, and that the true Halo 2 experience will be on the XBox 2. So there you have it, assuming you want to buy and play that game all over again and you want to buy the XBox 2 to do it.
The point is third party applications should not rely on them, and these functions could be provided by third party software as well and so they should be interchangable, not rely solely on MS's implementation.
I agree that selling software actually labeled as beta is a bad idea, but don't we already pay for software that require constant patching, such as the latest release versions of Windows, Microsoft Office, and nearly all of the latest games? Does release software even live up to the quality expected?
...they assume that the one system you'd be running wouldn't be Linux. In truth it could apply to any OS but they impose the assumption that you would choose Windows.
A very good article has detailed why the shift from nVidia to ATI happened, it's very enlightening. It's interesting to note that ATI wouldn't be where it is today had Microsoft not adopted their pixel shading implementation for DirectX. Perhaps their feud with nVidia over the X-Box has led to this, along with ATI being chosen for X-Box 2?
Right, and it's my experience that securing Linux is not only a lot easier because there is more information readily available to allow you to determine exactly what you're running and the flexibility in configuring it, but because there are distributions that address these concerns on the desktop with easy to use interfaces such as Redhat's Firewall configuration tool, Services configuration tool, SuSE's YaST 2 configuration tool, so that it's more accessible to the new user.
On OS X and on Windows, applications are categorized in a Extensions Folder and Control Panel, that allows an obvious method of accessing tools that configure the important functions of your system. It is much less daunting than a command line to the new user, as the most important tools and settings are presented in a way that prevents having to collect as much information as is required to accomplish the same tasks on the command line.
In desktop Linux distributions this is happening as well, and often this leads to a greater understanding of the command line. The curious user will notice the relation between the GUI applications and the commands they invoke, and as many tasks still require using the command line, the user will not be totally lost having already been familiar with a more accessible representation of the same tools.
Hopefully more GUI applications will be written to cover a larger scope of command line tools, making them more accessible. A lot of users now have grown up on the GUI, having been the preferred method of interacting with the majority of PC users now since they have become much more affordable and accessible. It's beneficial to provide an interface that caters to that group because it allows more people to get familiar with the OS in a familiar way!
In the end, both the Genesis and the SNES ended up having a solid library with excellent games because they were both playing hard. It is important that the PlayStation has proven loyal console gamers will go to the platform with the best titles regardless of brand name, hardware specs, or hype. The Saturn and N64 were formidable foes in those respects. The N64 was designed by SGI, code named Project Reality, rendered CG before your eyes and had Mario. The Saturn had Virtua Fighter, was out the door earlier, and blew away the more expensive Jaguar and 3DO.
Today's console market has many more exclusives, and every console manufacturer is trying to lure customers with lasting incentives to remain on the platform, such as Live!, PSX backward compatibility, Gran Turismo, Halo 2, Final Fantasy 11, Nintendo's AAA 1st party titles, exclusive contracts for Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, which console has the most hit titles from japan, these are all things gamers have to consider when buying a console today, and with the next generation it is going to get much worse.
Microsoft are introducing PlaysForSure, the next Xbox will have Media Center tie-ins and stuff will probably be tied into Longhorn. Longhorn will no doubt feature multimedia extensions that cooperate with the XBox 2, and will feature the .NET platform. The Xbox 2 will probably feature the .NET platform as well, games will be easily moved from PC to Xbox 2 and vice versa, making both platforms more attractive.
So Microsoft is predictable (embrace and extend, third time's a charm just press on, rinse wash repeat), and we know Nintendo will have something special (both hardware/software wise, DS tie-ins, they also want to launch the earliest), the wild card here is Sony. What the hell are they going to do? What incentive does Squaresoft have to stay with Sony when MS Moneybags is probably going to do their damnedest to snap them up? Are Sony going to have a "PSX" pulled on them by MS? After Squaresoft announced the advantages of the Sony platform, it had a snowball effect on third parties, and the PSX went on to be an overwhelming success.
Sony tries to sell game systems like high priced hardware that does it all, and they expect everything else to just fall into place. But I have a feeling consumers don't really react as well to that approach when it comes to video games, and this far it has been coincidental. With the PSX they got lucky because they made the friendliest console, they didn't put vast resources into an unknown venture so they took off-the-shelf parts and tried to pull together something decent and easy to program. Luckily Square and others decided the Saturn was botched and the N64 was too limited. They got lucky with the PS2 when they launched a year before everyone else and they could still feed off the momentum from the PlayStation.
But during that first year the PlayStation 2 had a pretty poor library. Imagine if Microsoft and Nintendo had launched just then, it would have been a different story for Sony, because the PS2 needed that year to catch up to the borked launch Sony made. Have they learned from that, or will the PS3 be the same? Now that the PS3 will probably likely launch after Nintendo or MS or at the same time, and the Xbox having a decent software library with enough big names to give gamers a good looking preview of what they might see for the Xbox 2, Sony doesn't have the
Because Gambas is such a high quality release that seems viable, usable, and competitive, everyone is automatically comparing it to commercial alternatives. This is but a testament to the quality of Gambas itself. Great job on the project, we should hope that every open source project would be of such high quality, and releasing an equally high quality IDE developed in Gambas along with it. Simply amazing.
Intel already has more fabs than AMD, this isn't the problem. Dell would be including AMD chips in their systems if it weren't for the fact that AMD doesn't have enough fabs to keep up with demand.
GUIs that give cryptic error messages when something DOES go wrong don't help either, since the error is represented in a much different way than people are used to when interacting with PCs. An error flashes on the screen, you have no idea why as it interrupts your work (unless you're very observant, and already know a great deal about computers), and nothing about the error message tells you what to do, in a GUI format.
There's no button for "Reconfigure option X" or "Reload driver Y" or "Open the conf file for program Z" that even gives you a hint of what's going wrong. And even when you open the conf file, you wouldn't know what to do.
Perhaps in Linux if you're in the habit of running a program from a terminal you have more of an idea of what's going on, but again, you'd have to know something about what you're doing. How obvious is this, even to a recent Windows convert? There are things that become "common sense" that everyone forgets to describe in a help manual. Troubleshooting is especially difficult if you don't know what you're doing and you're afraid of doing further damage to your PC.
These are probably the biggest roadblocks preventing users from becoming adjusted to computers and actually know what they're doing. MS recently started pimping the term "discoverable UI," perhaps this idea could be applied to error reporting and configuring in general. Instead of hiding away advanced options, or restricting configuration to editing a conf file, is there a way to make these concepts easier to understand to the end user?
Instead of "keeping users dumb through obscurity" it might be better to find ways of making things more obvious. People won't touch something if they know it breaks their PC, and they'll be less cautious in checking those options if something IS broken.
The most interesting part, however, is that MS may be putting up .NET as the development environment for the X-Box 2. It makes sense that MS would try to leverage their gaming platform to lure developers onto the .NET platform and commit their engines to that API.
On another note, could Linux and Mono play much of a role in this if the Cell does indeed provide a Linux environment for development? If Sony is able to provide a less expensive development environment, development costs may ultimately go down and the consumer would benefit.
This could be either by the increase of choice since the bar of entry would be lowered for smaller software houses, or by cost if the games are indeed cheaper as a result; Existing engines and software could be ported or would be compatible, or due to the the ease of coding on a familiar platform.
It has been stated before that the PlayStation 3 is expected to be capable of distributed processing due to the capabilities of the Cell architecture. Whether or not that will indeed be the case remains to be seen, it is certainly a lofty goal for the current market penetration (not to mention speeds) of broadband in the home. Does Sony expect these PS3s to cooperate with their Cell-based television sets?
If there's a standard DRM method, it's more likely to be used by all providers, instead of going with a proprietary DRM method and making it more likely to reduce the amount platforms on which the DRMed files can be played. Right now the big breakthrough will come from a format that allows DRM on everything, instead of letting a particular vendor who competes and dominates have complete control over a ubiquitous DRM method.
But many more people could benefit from this idea if it were part of Firefox, or some other cross-platform application. It doesn't have to be Firefox, that just sprung to mind because it also brought tabs to the masses, even if Opera already supported this.
Agreed, but the Firefox codebase is very extensible. It already covers actions on local files, allows you to program applications in XUL markup (such as the Calendar that you can download from Mozilla themselves), this could simply be one of those applications.
Really awesome. Perhaps this could be added to Firefox, especially for browsing local folders. If it's targetting IE as competition, perhaps it should also include such capabilities. It pioneered tabs as a way to revolutionize browsing, and it would be useful (to me at least) if it included this functionality.
If not, Nautilus and Konqueror could also benefit from this ability. It would help cut down on time. Drag a file onto a tab, you can paste/move/extract to that folder. Click back on a tab, move a directory higher up into the tree, maybe you're organizing your MP3 collection and you need to recategorize a few songs or whatever.
It's a love-hate relationship.
And why not? This has been the open source way for a while now. It's about choice. If users want to browse with IE or Safari or KDE, let them, but provide a plugin compatible with that browser.
Other examples are Cygwin, you can compile and run Linux applications on Windows. Jabber, integrates into many IM clients.
Setting the standards now and getting everyone to accept a cross-platform next generation web interface is much more important than getting everyone to use Firefox and adhere to W3C standards. This should be the goal right now.
OHHHhhhhhhh shit man! That shit is mad funny! I don't care where you from.
And if he ain't considered a GENIUS for sayin' what needs to be said by gum on air and shit then he should be considered that for being a comic genius.
Who would actually in this day and age go up to someone on TV and say something like that? People today can not take a joke. His ass would be sued and never allowed on TV like some people said, fo' sho'.
"Slander" and all that shit. Fuck you, if you can't take a joke and sue them until they're poor. That shit is hella weak, cos you can't come step when the truth is in yo' face. What's wrong with people today?
And even if you don't think it's the truth and you got a different opinion, well fuck you for not letting someone else express theirs and cutting their shit off with a commercial. WTF is the matter with you now? Free speach my ass, truth is you can't even get up and say watchu want on a world-wide CNN type network. What the hell is that shit?
Free speach loud as you can yell it, that's about it. And then you gots people belittling you and shit.
Yo're not allowed to say an opinion unless you can stand up to yourself with tons of people with YEARS of practice in bullshit.
You're not allowed to say an opinion unless you got hella buckzz and lawyers and shit to SPEND money to say that you gotz tha right to say something. WTF is wrong with this shit?
OK so now to say anything you gotta own tha TV, you gotta own tha cash and tha lawyers, and you gotta own tha politicians with they secrit keys ta pull tha plug ta fuck up ya network lest ye protect yourself by lining they pockets and supporting they shit.
Fuck that. So by the time you get free speach, you're already hindered by not being able to say shit about politikz, plus then you gots no reason to complain cos you got that $$$ and lawyerz and you're sedated, either that or worn out by the process of accumulating all this shit.
Hellz ya you gotta be Michael Moore to get up and talk about this shit and bully your way onto the screen and be an asshole. Yeah lotta people think he's an asshole but who fucken cares cos he's the one up on tha screen tellin ya what's what. Get yo own damn show.
One joker did and he got laughed off the stage fast because people realized his shit was bull, he gots nothin' ta say because he just got up to make a spectacle out of Moore. Well Moore's really talking about shit that's affectin' everyone for a long time, not some ass trying ta get his 15 minutes of fame by yellin' at someone who's getting his 15 minutes of fame.
Lotta people may get 15 minutes of fame but it's what you do with that 15 minutes that makes you go into history or not. WTF is wrong with people criticizing other people who gots something to say?
Let these people say something. If it's shit well let everyone else decide that it's shit. How you gonna pull the plug on them before everyone else gets to judge what you pooh poohed? You think you can speak for everyone? What the hell makes your goddam opinion so much more important than anyone else's?
I dont' care what your background is or who you from or what you is, wtf you thinking if you don't think everyone can have their opinion on shit?
Holy shit!
Damn right I'm putting my name on this.